I can't use $20 of credit (gpt-5 thinking via intellij's pro AI subscription) a month right now with plenty of usage so I'm surprised at the $1k figure. Is Claude that much more expensive? (a quick Google suggests yes actually).

Having said the above some level of AI spending is the new reality. Your workplace pays for internet right? Probably a really expensive fast corporate grade connection? Well they now also need to pay for an AI subscription. That's just the current reality.

I don't know what Intellij's AI integration is like, but my brief Claude Code experience is that it really chews through tokens. I think it's a combination of putting a lot of background info into the context, along with a lot of "planning" sort of queries that are fairly invisible to the end user but help with building that background for the ultimate query.

Aider felt similar when I tried it in architect mode; my prompt would be very short and then I'd chew through thousands of tokens while it planned and thought and found relevant code snippets and etc.

Paying for Internet is not a great analogy imo. If you don't pay $1k/mo for Internet, you literally can't work.

What happens if you don't pay $1k/mo for Claude? Do you get an appreciable drop in productivity and output?

Genuinely asking.

Anthropic and OpenAI both have a high SSO/enterprise tier tax.

The fast corporate internet connection is probably 1000$ for 100 developers or more...